TOWARD A TECHNOGRAPHY OF EVERYDAY LIFE: THE METHODOLOGICAL LEGACY OF JAMES W. CAREY’S ECOLOGY OF TECHNOCULTURE AS COMMUNICATION Phillip Vannini Jaigris Hodson April Vannini Royal Roads University York University Royal Roads University In this paper we identify Carey’s contributions to the concept of technoculture and attempt to systematize his writings on communication, culture, and technology in order to craft a methodological strategy for the study of technoculture based on participant observation and contemporary ethnographic practices of representation. After introducing a definition of technoculture we outline how technography—the study of technoculture in everyday life—builds upon two sensitizing metaphors: technoculture as ecology and as semiosis. Our discussion of technography shows the potential of this research strategy for the study of the symbolic interaction amongst technics, technological practices, social agents, and the natural environment. Keywords: Technology; Culture; Research Methodology; Ethnography; Symbolic Interaction; James W. Carey To enter given technological worlds is to enter actual social relations J.W. Carey (2006, p. 214). We can best summarize James Carey’s vision of communication through three analogies. The first, communication as culture, draws upon a Geertzian and symbolic interactionist model of reality construction as emergent and inevitably social and semiotic. The second, communication as ritual, derives inspiration from a Deweyan view of sociality as the organic constitution of individual and collective habit. The third, culture as technology, fuses the modified instrumentalism typical of the pragmatist tradition with the material-ecological spirit of the Chicago School and the communication revolution spawned by Harold Innis. Together, these three analogies carry the genes of a 1 hermeneutic approach to the study of communication-as-culture-as-technology which constitutes Carey’s most important epistemological legacy. We wish to capture the methodological essence of this legacy through the use of a barbaric sound-bite co-opted for the purpose at hand from diverse fields: technography, or the ethnography of technoculture, which we define as an analytical and reflexive strategy of researching from the participants’ perspective the interconnections between social agents, their technological practices, their technics, and the natural environment. To the development of technography we dedicate our attention in this essay. Our focus on methodology in this article is both pragmatic and honorific. The pragmatic objective comes from our interest in studying technoculture, a concept which refers simultaneously to the cultural dimensions of technology and to the technological dimensions of culture. A fundamental view of humans as engaged in making their unique ways of life is central to this approach. We can define technoculture the “creative process whereby people produce and maintain forms of life and society and systems of meaning and value” (Christians and Carey, 1981, p. 346, emphasis added). The concept of technoculture is not separate from that of culture writ large. There can be no culture without a “creative activity [which] is grounded in the ability to build cultural forms from symbols that express this will to live and assert meaning” (Christians and Carey, 1981, p. 346, emphasis added). Similarly, there can be no technology aside from an ecological system of meaningful symbolic practices arising from the joint interaction of humans, techniques, technics, and the natural environment. Because this definition is so vast, technoculture turns out to be a difficult subject matter to investigate ethnographically. To boot, the risk of falling prey to the threats of either technological determinism or cultural determinism is known to jeopardize inquiry in this field. As a way of solving these problems we propose here an original systematization of Carey’s approach to the ethnography of technoculture. In aiming for that goal we are less moved by the need to write an exegesis and more by the will to solve a technical problem. Thus, despite our 2 obvious focus on Carey’s work in what follows we take the license to both broaden his scope as well as to extend his views by borrowing other sympathetic scholars’ lenses. Our motive here is also personal and honorific. We have never met Carey face to face, but through his mediated word we have come to have a profound liking for the man behind the ideas. We love his stories, and wish he had at least once written an ethnographic work. His essays are so punctuated with precise anthropological observations, descriptive insights, and a thick “ethnocentric” attention to rituals that we cannot help but wonder what ethnography would look if Carey had done it. Here, therefore, by playing with his ideas and his vision for qualitative research we hope to prepare a Careyite-flavoured research strategy that will contribute to preserving his legacy. We have organized our essay into two main sections. Each section corresponds to one root metaphor which we have identified in Carey’s written work on technology, communication, and cultural studies and highlights a principle central in his scholarship. Each section also contains a short fragment of our field notes collected throughout our current ethnographic work. Our field notes serve to contextualize our interpretation of Carey’s thoughts, explain our arguments, and evoke ideas and concepts. We begin with an introduction to our research strategy and subject of study. Technography as a Research Strategy We began to conduct fieldwork amongst ferry commuters in the winter of 2005-2006. What began as a single study of a small island community, Gabriola Island, in British Columbia’s Strait of Georgia (Hodson and Vannini, forthcoming) has now generated an ongoing multi-site ethnographic project that looks at the role played by public and private marine transportation in the structuring of everyday rituals in coastal communities all over the coast of the province. For our fieldwork we employ typical ethnographic methods of data collection. Even though we do place an unusually 3 heavy reliance on group conversations and interviews—since we believe that some of the more complex questions we investigate can best be approached through group dialogue and collective reflection with informants—we do not think of our ethnographic approach to technoculture as a novel method of data collection. Technography is instead a relatively unique strategy of making sense of and representing data. Our approach attempts to draw upon a reflexive, narrative, embodied, and sensuous approach to ethnographic representation in order to make sense of, while evoking sensations of, corporeal presence and bodily movement in space and material engagement with technics. Technography strives to rediscover McLuhan’s rhetorical style as a way to decenter linear academic writing and as an impressionist technique liable to convey images of technoculture as multi-perspectival, complex, contradictory, rhizomatic, and heteroglossic (see Vannini and Vannini, 2007). As a creative practice, like art, technography reflects on the “miracles of social life” and aims to “take the sound of the sea, the intonation of a voice, the texture of a fabric, the design of a face, the play of light upon a landscape and wrench these ordinary phenomena out of the backdrop of existence and…“into the foreground of wonderment” (Carey, 1989a, p. 24). The social practice of writing is itself a form of techne and thus we envision technography as a self-conscious technological strategy; a form of inquiry guided by the reflexive awareness that its communication techniques directly constitute the object which it bespeaks. Furthermore, we intend technography to work by way of employing sensitizing concepts (Christians and Carey, 1981). Technography aims at bridging the binary opposition between postmodern ethnography and analytical ethnography by privileging the local without losing sight of the global, by consisting of multiple layers of evocative description and situated interpretation, and by satisfying criteria of in-depth observation, contextualization, comparison, and transferability of concepts (Christians and Carey, 1981) as well as narrative representation. Despite the importance of these criteria, however, as technographers in our empirical studies we believe “we [sh]ould talk less about rigor and more about originality […] 4 draw more on the vocabulary of poetry and less on the vocabulary of metaphysics” (Carey, 1989a, p. 94). Technography is a way of investigating the ecological relations amongst environment, technics, techniques, and social agents without privileging any one of these in particular. Technography is intends to redress the partial views of much contemporary writing on technoculture which emphasize either “happy pastorals of progress or grim narratives of power and domination” (Carey, 1989a, p. 9). Technography views technics and resources as meaningful and powerful, but aims at avoiding the anthropomorphism typical of actor-network theory, as well as that perspective’s tendency to downplay power hierarchies. Technography also intends to compensate for the anthropocentric bias of much ethnographic writing by placing a critical moral emphasis on the deep ecological rights of natural resources not to be exploited and by focusing on the ontologically-constitutive role of land, water, and air in culture and social interaction. Finally, technography aims to be cognizant